#Thomas B. Edsall

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For now, Ewig wrote, the United States is not a competitive authoritarian regime. The results of the 2020 national elections and the institutional opposition to the insurrection in 2021 “helped to avoid that. But some U.S. states do look suspiciously competitive authoritarian.”

Why is democracy under such stress now? There are many answers to that question, including, crucially, the divisiveness inherent in the elevated levels of contemporary polarization that makes democratic consensus so difficult to achieve.

In an April 2021 paper, four scholars, Samuel Wang of Princeton, Jonathan Cervas of Carnegie Mellon, Bernard Grofman of the University of California, Irvine, and Keena Lipsitz of Queens College, address the basic question of what led to the erosion among a substantial number of voters of support for democratic principles in a nation with a two-century-plus commitment to this tradition:

In the United States, rules and institutions from 1790, when voters comprised white male landowners and slave owners in a nation of four million, were not designed to address today’s governance needs. Moreover, existing rules and institutions may amplify background conditions that drive polarization. The decline of civic life in America and the pluralism it once nurtured has hastened a collapse of dimensionality in the system.

Americans once enjoyed a rich associational life, Wang and his colleagues write, the demise of which contributes to the erosion of democracy: “Nonpolitical associations, such as labor unions, churches, and bowling leagues, were often crosscutting, bringing people from different backgrounds into contact with one another, building trust and teaching tolerance.” In recent years, however, “the groups that once structured a multidimensional issue space in the United States have collapsed.”

The erosion of democracy is also the central topic of a Feb. 13 podcast with Martin Wolf, a Financial Times columnist and the author of “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.” Wolf makes the case that “economic changes and the performance of the economy interacting produced quite a large number of people who feared that they were becoming losers. They feared that they risked falling into the condition of people who really were at the bottom.”

At the same time, Wolf continued, “the immense growth of the financial sector and the dominance of the financial sector in management generated some simply staggering fortunes at the top.” Instead of helping to drive democratization, the market system “recreated an oligarchy. I think there’s no doubt about that.”

Those who suffered, Wolf noted, “felt the parties of the center-left had largely abandoned them and were no longer really interested in their fate.”

Two senior fellows at Brookings, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, explore threats to American democracy in a January 2022 analysis, “Is Democracy Failing and Putting Our Economy at Risk?” Citing data from six surveys, including those by Pew, P.R.R.I., Voter Study Group and CNN, the authors write:

Support in the United States for political violence is significant. In February 2021, 39 percent of Republicans, 31 percent of independents and 17 percent of Democrats agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” In November, 30 percent of Republicans, 17 percent of independents and 11 percent of Democrats agreed that they might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Galston and Kamarck observe:

Even though constitutional processes prevailed, and Mr. Trump is no longer president, he and his followers continue to weaken American democracy by convincing many Americans to distrust the results of the election. About three-quarters of rank-and-file Republicans believe that there was massive fraud in 2020 and Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president.

In fact, Galston and Kamarck continue, “the 2020 election revealed structural weaknesses in the institutions designed to safeguard the integrity of the electoral process,” noting that “if Mr. Pence had yielded to then-President Trump’s pressure to act, the election would have been thrown into chaos and the Constitution placed in jeopardy.”

Since then, Galston and Kamarck note, the attack on democracy

has taken a new and dangerous turn. Rather than focusing on the federal government, Trump’s supporters have focused on the obscure world of election machinery. Republican majorities in state legislatures are passing laws making it harder to vote and weakening the ability of election officials to do their jobs.

American democracy, the two authors conclude,

is thus under assault from the ground up. The most recent systematic attack on state and local election machinery is much more dangerous than the chaotic statements of a disorganized former president. A movement that relied on Mr. Trump’s organizational skills would pose no threat to constitutional institutions. A movement inspired by him with a clear objective and a detailed plan to achieve it would be another matter altogether.

“The chances that this threat will materialize over the next few years,” Galston and Kamarck add, “are high and rising.”

If democracy fails in America, they contend,

It will not be because a majority of Americans is demanding a nondemocratic form of government. It will be because an organized, purposeful minority seizes strategic positions within the system and subverts the substance of democracy while retaining its shell — while the majority isn’t well organized, or doesn’t care enough, to resist. The possibility that this will occur is far from remote.

The anxiety about democratic erosion — even collapse — is widespread among those who think about politics for a living:

In his January 2022 article, “Democracy’s Arc: From Resurgent to Imperiled,” Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, joins those who tackle what has become an overriding topic of concern in American universities:

For a decade, the democratic recession was sufficiently subtle, incremental and mixed so that it was reasonable to debate whether it was happening at all. But as the years have passed, the authoritarian trend has become harder to miss. For each of the last fifteen years, many more countries have declined in freedom than have gained. By my count, the percentage of states with populations over one million that are democracies peaked in 2006 at 57 percent and has steadily declined since, dropping below a majority (48 percent) in 2019 for the first time since 1993.

In this country, Diamond continued, “Rising proportions of Americans in both camps express attitudes and perceptions that are blinking red for democratic peril. Common political ground has largely vanished.”

He adds: “Even in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, most Americans have still not come to grips with how far the country has strayed from the minimum elements of normative and behavioral consensus that sustain democracy.”

At the close of his essay, Diamond goes on to say:

It is human nature to seek personal autonomy, dignity and self-determination, and with economic development those values have become ascendant. But there is nothing inevitable about the triumph of democracy.

The next test will be in November 2024.

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One Man's Opinion on former President Trump Part 1

  In the latest episode of “Lest We Forget-Historical,” hosted by Lillian Cauldwell, she presents various media and political commentators who express their views on the hypothetical scenario of former President Trump becoming a dictator for a day. Among them is Mr. Thomas B. Edsall, a Washington D.C. commentator known for his weekly column on politics, demographics, and inequality. In his…

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Trump Is an Open Book for Closed Minds

The mystery of 2024: How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him? Why hasn’t a decisive majority risen up to deny a second term to a man in line to be judged the worst president in American history?

This opinion column by Thomas B. Edsall is well worth reading because it describes many theories by experts about why so many Americans are still devoted to Trump despite all the harm he has done and could do to this country. This is a gift🎁link, so you can read the entire article.

"Motivated Ignorance"

I'd like to highlight one of the column's theories by Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. Edsall quotes Jacobson regarding his belief that "motivated ignorance" plays an important role in keeping Trump supporters in the MAGA fold.

Motivated ignorance differs from the more familiar concept of rational ignorance in that ‘ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it.’ That is, it is not simply that the benefits of accurate political knowledge may be less than the cost of attaining it and thus not worth pursuing, but that the costs of having accurate information exceed the benefits. When expressed opinions and beliefs signal identification with a group, it is rational to stay ignorant of contradictory facts that, if acknowledged, would threaten to impose personal and social identity costs for the uncertain benefits of accurate knowledge. Only by remaining ignorant of such facts as those can Trump supporters avoid facing the painful possibility that they might have been wrong about him and their despised enemies, right. Such a realization could unsettle their self and social identities, estranging them from family and friends who remain within the MAGA fold. As Michael Patrick Lynch, a philosopher who studies political beliefs put it, “To be blunt, Trump supporters aren’t changing their minds because that change would require changing who they are, and they want to be that person.” Staying ignorant, deliberately or unconsciously, is thus rational.

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The damage inflicted on the nation during Donald Trump’s first term in office pales in comparison with what he will do if he is elected to a second term.

NYTimes: By Thomas B. Edsall 8/21/24

How can we know this? The best evidence is Trump himself. He has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to tear the country apart.

“Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters,” Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, writes in a forthcoming article in Liberties,

have made it clear that they will not accept defeat in November any more than they did when Trump lost four years ago. They believe that Trump is the one true legitimate president, that those who refuse to accept this fundamental fact are the true deniers, and that any result other than Trump’s restoration would be a thwarting of history’s purpose and a diabolical act of treason.

The authoritarian imperative has moved beyond Trumpian narcissism and the cultish MAGA fringe to become an article of faith from top to bottom inside the utterly transformed Republican Party, which Trump totally commands.

Like Wilentz, Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, does not mince words, writing by email:

All the dangers foreign and domestic posed by Trump’s cruelly vindictive, self-aggrandizing, morally unconstrained, reality-defying character — as evidenced in his first presidential term and in his unprecedented refusal to accept his 2020 electoral loss — would be magnified many times over in any subsequent term by three factors.

First, he has systematically eroded the norms and the institutional guardrails that initially set boundaries on the damage he and his now more carefully chosen loyalist enablers are poised to do in carrying out the dangerous project to which they are jointly committed.

Second, their failures to insulate themselves from electoral and legal constraints during the dry run of 2017-21 have led them to formulate far more sophisticated and less vulnerable plans for their second attempt at consolidating permanent control of the apparatus of our fragile republic.

And third, their capture of the Supreme Court and indeed much of the federal judiciary has put in place devastating precedents like the immunity ruling of July 1 that will license a virtually limitless autocratic power — if, but only if, they are not stopped during the epic struggle that will reach one climax this Nov. 5 and another next Jan. 6.

The most important reason a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than his first is that if he does win this year, Trump will have triumphed with the electorate’s full knowledge that he has been criminally charged with 88 felonies and convicted of 34 of them (so far); that he has promised to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family”; and that he intends to “totally obliterate the deep state” by gutting civil service protections for the 50,000 most important jobs in the federal work force, a central tenet of what he calls his “retribution” agenda.

Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, contended in an email:

The question is how much the Supreme Court presidential immunity decision will undermine institutional guardrails against Trump’s anti-democratic behavior. If there are no repercussions for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, intimidation of election officers, and casual handling of classified materials, then Trump will be emboldened to partake in such activities again.

Trump has made clear that norms of governance — e.g., civility, accepting electoral defeat, and treating members of the political opposition as legitimate holders of power — do not apply to him.

While Kamala Harris has pulled even with, if not ahead of, Trump in recent polling, Republican attacks on her have yet to reach full intensity, and the outcome remains very much up for grabs.

Bruce Cain, a Stanford political scientist, voiced concerns similar to Wronski’s by email:

Trump is more erratic, impulsive, and self-interested than your average candidate and is much bolder than most in testing the boundaries of what he can get away with. In political insider lingo, he is a guy who likes to put his toes right up to the chalk line between legal and illegal activity.

There is some evidence that his bad traits are getting worse with old age, but the more serious problem is the lowering of institutional and political guardrails that constrained him in the past. The decision in Trump v. the U.S. entitling a former president to “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” and “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts” seems to me particularly problematic. The court left open the question of how to distinguish between official and unofficial acts. Trump’s personality is such that he will without doubt test the limits of this distinction.

Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale and an expert on the regimes of Stalin and Hitler, wrote by email in reply to my inquiry: “It would be closer to the truth to think about a second Trump administration beginning from the images of Jan. 6, 2021. That is where Trump left us and that is where he would begin.”

Unlike oligarchy and tyranny, Snyder argued,

Democracy depends upon example, and Trump sets the worst possible one. He has openly admired dictators his entire life. He would encourage Xi and Putin. The Russians make completely clear that a Trump presidency is their hope for victory in Ukraine. Allowing Russia to win that war, which I think is Trump’s likely orientation, destabilizes Europe, encourages China toward aggression in the Pacific, and undermines the rule of law everywhere.

Charles Stewart, a political scientist at M.I.T., warned in an email:

A second Trump administration would escalate the threat of authoritarian governance, most notably, by sanctioning politically motivated prosecutions. Even if the courts resisted the baldest of efforts, doing so will be costly to political opponents and also continue to silence dissent among conservatives who wish to have political careers.

In 2016 and for much of his first term, major elements of the Republican Party viewed Trump with deep suspicion, repeatedly blocking or weakening his more delusional initiatives. That’s no longer the case.

“The Republican Party is fully and totally behind Trump — the epicenter of election disruption — even after two impeachments, an insurrection and a criminal conviction,” Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton, pointed out in an email, adding:

The support that Trump received after Jan. 6, and the entire effort to overturn the election, demonstrates that much of the G.O.P. is fine with doing this. Now that the party knows what insurrection looks like and has given its stamp of approval by nominating Trump, we know that this is officially part of the Republican playbook.

One thing is clear: Trump would assume control of the White House in 2025 with far more power and far fewer restraints than when he took office in January 2017.

Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, argued that Trump’s near-dictatorial rule over the Republican Party and the absence of intraparty dissent will play a crucial role if he returns to the White House in 2025:

Democratic backsliding rests heavily on the absence of contrary messages within the party undermining democracy, because (a) this further radicalizes sympathetic voters (who take their cues from in-party politicians) and (b) makes the battle into an “us” vs. “them” partisan fight that is easily used by demagogues to justify further democratic backsliding.

Both Hacker and Frances Lee, a Princeton political scientist, pointed out that even with solid support from fellow House and Senate Republicans, Trump’s power and freedom to act will depend on partisan control of the House and the Senate.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. As Hacker put it:

The scale of the threat posed by a Trump presidency will rest far more than commonly recognized on the exact balance of partisan power in D.C. If Trump has both houses of Congress — along with, of course, a highly sympathetic Supreme Court — the pace and extent of democratic backsliding will be much greater than if Republicans “merely” hold the White House.

Given its role in appointments and its greater prominence, the Senate is the critical fulcrum. We saw in 2019-20 that Democrats holding the House helped keep the spotlight on Trump’s misdeeds and blocked some of Trump’s most egregious potential legislative moves. But House control is worth much less than Senate control, and a Democratic House may not be enough to prevent serious democratic backsliding.

If Democrats win a House majority, Lee wrote by email, “their control of the House would foreclose any opportunity for one-party legislating, such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.”

In addition, Lee argued, “Trump’s proposals and priorities still do divide the Republican Party internally. Even though Trump has improved his position with the congressional wing of the Republican Party relative to 2017, he still faces pockets of intraparty resistance, especially but not exclusively on foreign policy.”

As a result, Lee wrote, “the remaining Trump-skeptic Republicans in Congress will have pivotal status in a narrow Republican majority. So the bottom line is that we don’t know much about the influence Trump can wield until we see the outcome of the congressional elections.”

Even accounting for Lee’s caution, however, Trump’s base of support has grown over the past eight years to encompass not only the MAGA electorate and the network of elected officials who have learned dissent is politically suicidal, but also the individuals and interests that make up the party’s infrastructure, especially the donors and lobbyists.

Just three and a half years ago, in the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, this wing of the party threatened to become a major roadblock to a second Trump term. Leaders of Wall Street and big business voiced seemingly deep concern over the threat to democracy posed by Trump and his followers, with many of these leaders vowing that they would never contribute to a Trump campaign.

“Many of the nation’s richest people said after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that they would never again back former President Trump,” David Lauter of The Los Angeles Times reported. Those concerns have dissipated.

In March, The Washington Post reported: “Elite donors who once balked at Trump’s fueling of the Capitol insurrection, worried about his legal problems and decried what they saw as his chaotic presidency are rediscovering their affinity for the former president — even as he praises and vows to free Jan. 6 defendants, promises mass deportations and faces 88 felony charges.”

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of Trump’s increasingly strong ties to his party’s financial establishment. His ability to shape the flow of campaign money is second only to the power of his endorsements, making obeisance to his authority even more crucial to political survival.

Trump’s shifting relationship with the Republican establishment’s major-donor community can best be seen in the changing composition of his financial backing from 2016 to 2024.

In 2016, many of Trump’s top backers, according to OpenSecrets, could best be described as marginal figures in the world of campaign finance:

McMahon Ventures, a consulting firm founded by the owners of World Wrestling Entertainment, $6 million; Mountainaire, a chicken producer, $2.01 million.

In terms of money, Trump today is a very different candidate. The corporate qualms that surfaced in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection have been subordinated to the prospect of billions in tax breaks for business and the rich if Trump returns to office.

According to OpenSecrets, of the $472.8 million Trump and allied PACs have raised through the middle of this year, a quarter, $115.4 million, has come from the securities and investment industry, the financial core of the Republican establishment. In 2016, this industry effectively shunned Trump, giving him a paltry $20.8 million.

“The leaders of major industries’ decision to back Trump suggests that the economic benefits of staying on the team will outweigh principled concerns about democratic norms should push come to shove in a second Trump term,” Eric Schickler, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote by email in response to my query.

There are several other factors raising the level of danger posed by a second Trump term in the White House.

When he took office in 2017, Trump had no clear agenda, just a collection of grievances, impulses and prejudices; no carefully prepared list of prospective loyalists to appoint to key posts; and in essence no understanding of the workings of the federal government.

These deficiencies kept many, but not all, of his destructive impulses in check as top aides and key party leaders repeatedly steered him away from the cliff.

If he wins this year, those checks on Trump will be gone.

Trump’s advisers and allies have put together a detailed agenda along with lists of men and women who are ready to do his bidding — developments that have been detailed in this column and elsewhere.

In his email, Schickler emphasized the crucial role played by Trump’s successful efforts to drive Republican opponents out of elective office. Now, Schickler wrote:

“Each Republican member’s own political survival depends on being loyal to the team.” He continued, “Republicans will stand by Trump in any potential impeachment battle — as result, there will be no chance for a conviction, essentially making any attempt to enforce accountability into just another partisan showdown.”

During his first term, Schickler noted, Trump “raised the possibility of taking a threatening action — such as sending in troops to arrest or even shoot protesters,” but he was held back by his own appointees and senior government employees.

“The big difference in 2025,” Schickler cautioned,

is that there is a much more built-out political operation supporting Trump. Appointees will be carefully vetted for their loyalty. When it comes time to implement an order that, for example, removes civil service protections from most federal workers, the top layers of executive agencies will be filled with people eager to follow through and weed out those with “bad” views.

Not only will Trump be more robustly protected if he returns to the White House in 2025; a key institution — the Supreme Court — is more likely to back his initiatives now that it is dominated by a 6-3 conservative majority, half of which is made up of Trump appointees.

That conservative bloc has already signaled its willingness to unleash Trump in its July 1 immunity decision, Trump v. United States.

The ruling gave Trump new grounds to challenge the criminal charges and convictions he faces and suggests broad approval for future Trump policies and initiatives. The president, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 6-3 majority opinion, “may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.”

Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, wrote by email:

Trump says he wants to replace the bureaucracy — part of the “deep state” — with political appointees. He wants to go after his political enemies, lock up refugees in camps, and implicit in all this he will appoint cabinet members and high-level officials who support what he wants to do instead of the “grown-ups” who constrained him at every turn during his presidency.

In this context, Shapiro continued:

The above threat to democracy has to be seen, on the face of it, as real, given that the Supreme Court has opened the possibility of immunity on any presidential actions, however criminal they might be. What Trump has said he will do, and what the Supreme Court has opened the door to — what he can do in terms of what would be criminal and not just impeachable offenses — pose an enormous threat to the nation and American democracy.

Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, summarized the risks raised by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in an email:

The court’s decisions have made it harder for the judiciary, Congress or other institutions to hold Trump in check. The immunity decision certainly enables an authoritarian presidency far beyond that envisioned by the people who wrote the Constitution.

The biggest difference if Trump is re-elected, Jacobson argued,

will be the absence of officials in the administration with the stature, experience, and integrity to resist Trump’s worst instincts in such matters. A White House staffed with sycophantic loyalists or white nationalist zealots who share Trump’s ignorance and contempt for norms and institutions will give him freer rein than in the first term.

As Sean Wilentz warns:

Trump, who does not speak in metaphors, has made it plain: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath.” This is a time for imagining the worst. Not a single loyal Republican official has objected to that statement or to similar MAGA warnings about an impending civil war.

Yet, Wilentz writes, “many of even the most influential news sources hold to the fiction Trump and his party are waging a presidential campaign instead of a continuing coup, a staggering failure to recognize Trump’s stated agenda.”

I am going to give the last word to Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian:

Trump is in the classic dictatorial position: He needs to die in bed holding all executive power to stay out of prison. This means that he will do whatever he can to gain power, and once in power will do all that he can to never let it go. This is a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else. It is entirely inconsistent with democracy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/opinion/trump-second-term-2025.html

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/opinion/trump-maga-sources-support.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb&cbgrp=p&pvid=94312AC5-247A-45F0-8389-81D334A88979

The New York Times

Thomas B. Edsall

The Real Trump Mystery

“Interestingly, though, ‘feelings of animosity toward Democratic groups do not predict favorability toward the Republican Party, Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell,’ Mason, Wronski and Kane wrote. Instead, ‘Trump support is uniquely predicted by animosity toward marginalized groups in the United States.’”

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By Thomas B. Edsall

In the world of political fund-raising, there is hard money, soft money, dark money — and Leonard Leo money.

Political advocacy and charitable groups controlled by Leo now have far more assets than the combined total cash on hand of the Republican and Democratic National, Congressional and Senatorial committees: $440.9 million.

Leo is a 58-year-old graduate of Cornell Law School, a Catholic with ties to Opus Dei — the most conservative “personal prelature” in the church hierarchy — chief strategist of the Federalist Society for more than a quarter century and a crucial force behind the confirmations of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. He has emerged over the past five years as the dominant fund-raiser on the right.

As Leo has risen to this pinnacle of influence, he has become rich, profiting from the organizations he has created and from the consulting fees paid by the conservative advocacy and lobbying groups he funds.

Leo has an overarching agenda. In a 2022 speech he made upon receiving the John Paul II New Evangelization Award at the Catholic Information Center, he warned fellow Catholics: “Catholic evangelization faces extraordinary threats and hurdles. Our culture is more hateful and intolerant of Catholicism than at any other point in our lives. It despises who we are, what we profess and how we act.”

Leo describes the adversaries of Catholicism as “these barbarians, secularists and bigots” who “have been growing more numerous over the past few years. They control and use many levers of power.” He is determined to wrest the levers of power from “the grasp of liberals” and place them, permanently if possible, with those he sees as their rightful owner: social and economic conservatives.

Leo has most famously used his network and personal influence not only to establish a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court but also to secure appointment of deeply conservative justices throughout the federal and state court systems.

At the same time, Leo has provided essential support to the full gamut of right-wing advocacy and lobbying organizations, including the Federalist Society, Susan B. Anthony Pro-life America and the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

The millions of dollars Leo has raised through his tax-exempt nonprofits have, in turn, flowed to profit-making consulting companies owned, in part or wholly, by him. In 2016, he created the BH Group, a for-profit consulting firm that is now defunct, whichreceived at least $6.9 million from tax- exempt donor nonprofits run by him.

Four years later, Leo formed CRC Advisors, also a profit-making consulting firm. Since then, two of his tax-exempt donor organizations, the 85 Fund and the Concord Fund, have paid CRC Advisors more than $77 million, according to reports filed with the I.R.S.

Leo is a prodigious fund-raiser whose organizations take in and hand out hundreds of millions annually. For example, the 85 Fund, according to the I.R.S., raised $317.9 million from 2020 to 2022 and gave out grants totaling $147.4 million. During that same period, the 85 Fund paid CRC Advisors — of which Leo is chairman — fees totaling $55.2 million, according to I.R.S. filings and research by Accountable.us and ProPublica.

Similarly, the Concord Fund raised $150.7 million from 2020 to 2023 and awarded grants totaling $96.8 million, according to the I.R.S., and the Concord Fund paid CRC Advisors a total of $21.9 million.

In effect, Leo has created for himself and his for-profit partners at CRC Advisors a lucrative business model.

In 2021, Leo was the recipient of what is believed to be the single largest contribution to a politically oriented advocacy group: $1.6 billion from Barre Seid, an obscure but very wealthy Chicago electronics manufacturer. Leo used the money to create the Marble Freedom Trust, which had assets of more than $1 billion in April 2023, according to its most recent I.R.S. filing. That report shows that it gave $153.8 million to Schwab Charitable, $55.5 million to Leo’s Concord Fund and $7.6 million to the Knights of Columbus Charitable Fund.

The vast sums under Leo’s command have elevated him to the highest echelons of conservative influence and power.

Tracking payments to CRC Advisors from groups supported by Leo’s three major charities is particularly difficult because of his deliberate secretiveness. For a majority of grants, Leo uses specific “donor-advised funds,” or pass-throughs — vehicles designed to prevent the public from knowing who the beneficiaries of his largess are. Over the three years covered in the most recent I.R.S. reports, Leo’s charities channeled a total of $325.5 million through Schwab Charitable and $216.7 million through Donors Trust.

Leo or his designated representative can direct Schwab or Donors Trust to make contributions to specific groups, but those groups remain largely out of public view.

Here is how Donors Trust describes its services:

In today’s polarized climate, many conservative and libertarian donors worry about being able to manage their charitable giving in a way that aligns with their values. We help donors like you to have a positive, principled impact with your giving in a private, tax-friendly way. We are a charitable partner that not only understands your commitment to liberty but shares it, too.

The Donor Trust lists the grants it makes without identifying the source of the money. A quick scan of the groups receiving money from the Donor Trust in 2021 and 2022 includes many entities that Leo has publicly supported, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, $1.3 million; the Constitutional Defense Fund, $7.4 million; the Foundation for Government Accountability, $2.5 million; the State Policy Network, $17.4 million; the Federalist Society, $3.7 million; and Teneo Network, $6 million.

A second factor contributing to the opacity of financial transactions involving Leo’s donor organizations and the groups they fund is that they are not required to file timely reports. Instead, many tax-exempt groups file reports with the I.R.S. in November for the previous year. So the most recent filings for many of these organizations is November 2023 for information on activities in 2022, now nearly two years out of date.

By email, I asked Leo a series of questions about his financial transactions, including:

Can you explain what CRC Advisors did for the $6,058,832 in 2023, the $3,757,454 paid in 2022, the $7,679,331 in 2021 by the Concord Fund? What did CRC Advisors do for the 85 Fund after receiving payments of $21,360,985 in 2022, $21,715,382 in 2021, and $12,117,335 in 2020? Do these payments from 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) charities, which are controlled by you, to CRC Advisors — a for-profit consulting firm that you chair — amount to self-dealing, in violation of tax law? If not, what justifies these payments? I know you have dismissed these concerns as baseless, but could you explain how they are baseless? In addition to the payments to CRC Advisors from the Leo-Leonard-run donor groups, many of the groups that have received payments from the 85 Fund, the Concord Fund and the Marble Trust have hired CRC Advisors. What services do you provide these groups? Do you assist them in making grant applications to your donor groups?

In his emailed reply, Leo argued that all payments were legitimate and based on the quality of the product clients received:

CRC Advisors is a firm that employs over 100 best-in-class professionals who provide an unsurpassed level of value and impact through an all-encompassing suite of services, including program and events management, content creation, research, and all aspects of public affairs. Our fees and services are based on a rigorous compliance system that is established and managed by leading legal counsel, accountants, and management and compensation consultants. We are paid less for more than our progressive rivals, and the nonprofit clients we work with are governed by independent boards. We are happy to have these standards judged against the progressives’ Arabellaand Tides networks, or any other enterprise that is similar to us.

In May 2019, Leo told The Washington Post: “I don’t waste my time on stories that involve money and politics because what I care about is ideas.”

Despite the disclosure limitations surrounding the money flowing through the donor-advised funds, Leo’s charities do list some of their grantees, and some of those grantees, in turn, disclose payments to CRC Advisors on their reports to the I.R.S.

The tax filings from 2020 to 2023 show, for example, that Leo’s donor groups gave Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America at least $12 million. In its most recent tax filing, the Anthony group reported that it paid CRC Advisors $543,821 for “public relations consulting.”

Leo’s charities have given the Foundation for Government Accountability at least $2 million. From 2020 to 2022, the accountability foundation told the I.R.S. that it paid CRC Advisors $640,000 for “public relations.”

Or take the Federalist Society, the conservative legal think tank. Leo was formerly the vice president and is now a co-chairman of its board. His donor nonprofits have given it at least $15.5 million during the 2020s, according to tax records. In its most recent filingswith the I.R.S., the Federalist Society reported paying CRC Advisors $4.78 million from 2020 to 2022.

Last week, Hans Nichols, a reporter at Axios, published a letterLeo wrote to the recipients of grants from the 85 Fund. It said in part:

“Conservative philanthropy is too heavily weighted in the direction of ‘ideation’ — the development of and education about conservative ideas and policies. In contrast, vastly insufficient funds are going toward operationalizing and weaponizing those ideas and policies to crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society.”

To counter this misallocation of right-wing money, Leo told the grantees, “If others are not going to devote funding to operationalize or weaponize the conservative vision, then the 85 Fund needs to weight its support much more heavily in that direction and much less in the direction of research, policy and general education.”

The 85 Fund, Leo continued, “intends to gap-fill by placing much, much greater emphasis on projects and leaders that operationalize or weaponize ideas and policies.”

For beneficiaries of Leo’s grant-making organization struggling to figure out how to “operationalize or weaponize” ideas and policies, what better place is there than CRC Advisors to get guidance?

Leo’s financial activities have been subject to repeated investigations by such liberal groups as True North Research, which has released several studies; Accountable.us, which has also put Leo under the magnifying glass; and the Campaign for Accountability.

In April 2023, the Campaign for Accountability filed a complaintwith the I.R.S. seeking an investigation into seven Leo-affiliated organizations in order to determine

whether the Leo-affiliated nonprofits have diverted substantial portions of their income and assets, directly or indirectly, to the personal benefit of Leonard Leo. Most of these entities have either made substantial independent contractor payments to one or more of his for-profit business entities or made major contributions to other Leo-affiliated nonprofits that made such payments. Such payments were generally listed as made in exchange for alleged consulting, research, public relations, or similar services; however, CFA has reasonable questions about whether those alleged services were actually rendered at all or, if services were rendered, whether the payments made were substantially in excess of the fair market value of those services.

The Campaign for Accountability, in its complaint, cited investigative reporting by Heidi Przybyla of Politico about Leo’s growing affluence: “Beginning in 2016, coinciding with the multimillion-dollar payments paid to BH Group, Leonard Leo began living more lavishly. In 2017, Leonard Leo pledged to donate $1 million to Vatican initiatives worldwide.”

I asked Philip Hackney, a former I.R.S. expert in the law governing tax-exempt groups who is now a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, about Leo’s involvement with tax-exempt and for-profit groups.

In a phone interview, Hackney said the crucial issue when examining situations like Leo’s is whether the fees paid to his for-profit firms are “a fair amount for the services he is rendering.” The $77 million paid to CRC Advisors by Leo’s charitable funds “seems like a lot,” Hackney said.

Hackney noted, however, that when the I.R.S. seeks remedies in such cases, “it’s a hard battle to win” because the judgment of a fair price is subject to so many different interpretations, many of them subjective.

Marcus Owens, a former director of the I.R.S. Exempt Organizations Division — who is now a co-chair for nonprofits and tax-exempt organizations at the Washington law firm Loeb & Loeb — wrote by email:

There are, indeed, federal tax rules that govern related party transactions, particularly when the transactions involve a “disqualified person,” the phrase Congress used when it enacted section 4958 of the Internal Revenue Code back in 1986 to refer to an insider with the ability to wield influence over an organization that is exempt from federal income tax under either section 501(c)(3) or section 501(c)(4). For example, the Marble Trust and the Concord Fund are exempt under section 501(c)(4), while the 85 Fund is exempt under section 501(c)(3). Insider transactions that result in the insider receiving an excessive return, i.e., one that is greater than what fair market terms and conditions would provide, can lead to loss of tax-exempt status or the imposition of a penalty excise tax on the insider of 25 percent of the excessive amount, or both. Fair market terms and conditions are defined as what similar organizations would pay for similar goods or services under similar circumstances, a standard that encourages creative expression by attorneys and accountants.

While Leo has reached a pinnacle of power, he still has a lot riding on the outcome not only of the presidential election but also of the battle for control of the Senate.

Capturing the presidency is important to Leo not only for policy and ideological reasons, but also because, if Donald Trump is elected, he will appoint the next I.R.S. commissioner. It would be very unlikely that such an appointee would pursue an investigation into Leo’s finances.

Control of the Senate is also crucial because the Democratic-controlled Judiciary Committee last year subpoenaed Leo to talk about whether he was involved in gifts to members of the Supreme Court by prominent Republican donors.

In April, Leo declared that he was refusing to comply with the subpoena. “I am not capitulating,” he told reporters, to “Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and the left’s dark money effort to silence and cancel political opposition.”

Since then, the Senate Democratic leadership has been reluctant to try to enforce the subpoena — a virtually impossible task since it would require overcoming a filibuster. If Democrats retain control after the coming elections, they will be under considerable pressure to change the filibuster rules, raising the possibility that Leo could be forced to testify under oath about his activities.

The chances of that happening are, however, slim at best. The most likely outcome of the controversies surrounding Leo is that he will continue, unabated, in his drive to make America great again by devoting vast sums, relentless pressure and every kind of imaginable financial ingenuity to alter the balance of power and push America ever further to the right.

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: We Are Normalizing Trump. Again. by Thomas B. Edsall

By Thomas B. Edsall Can the former president forge an enduring coalition out of his cult of personality? Published: January 24, 2024 at 05:01AM from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/fBv3T6z via IFTTT

[fuojbe-beowgi]

"Democrats and Republicans Are Living in Different Worlds" by Thomas B. Edsall via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/opinion/masculinity-gender-gap-2024.html?partner=IFTTT

[remainnstobeseen]

If Democrats Win Back the House They Will Have John Roberts to Thank

By Thomas B. Edsall The Supreme Court strikes a blow for democracy — and Democrats. Published: June 14, 2023 at 05:02AM via NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/07alJGh

[studieesshow]

Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal?

By Thomas B. Edsall The question is how long it will last. Published: May 24, 2023 at 05:00AM via NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/ciVSw0z

[moishgil]

1 tsp of white entitlement, 2 tbsp of imagined victimhood plus 1 cup of tribal xenophobia; stoked together violently by an unscrupulous narcissistic demagogue = militant Trump'ican

1 tsp of white entitlement, 2 tbsp of imagined victimhood plus 1 cup of tribal xenophobia; stoked together violently by an unscrupulous narcissistic demagogue = militant Trump’ican

(republished from the NYTimes) Why Trump Is Still Their Guy You don’t hear his name as much. But as far as the G.O.P. is concerned, the former president rules. By Thomas B. Edsall Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality. April 21, 2021 His exile in Mar-a-Lago notwithstanding, Donald Trump’s authority over the Republican Party…

[davidblaska]

Democrats: 'Too woke, too extreme'

Democrats: ‘Too woke, too extreme’

Do Not Resuscitate! Four factors will make Tony Evers a one-term governor next November: Tony Evers 1) Woke public schools — in particular, their capitulation to critical race theory, transgenderism, chaos in the classroom, and dumbed down academics in the name of “equity.” Tony Evers ran the Department of Public Instruction for eight years; he wears that scarlet letter and it’s not an A-plus. 2)…

[contemplatingoutlander]

The Republican Party Is Now Officially the “Looney Tunes” Party

source

[edited]

[arcticdementor]

Do you believe, as many political activists and theorists do, that the contemporary Republican Party poses a threat to democracy? After all, much of its current leadership refuses to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and is dead set on undermining the concept of one person, one vote.

If it does pose such a threat, does that leave the Democratic Party as the main institutional defender of democracy?

…

The issue then becomes a question of strategic emphasis. Do Democrats’ difficulties grow more out of structural advantages of the Republican Party — better geographic distribution of its voters, the small-state tilt of the Electoral College and the Senate, more control over redistricting? Or do their difficulties stem from Democratic policies and positions that alienate key blocs of the electorate?

If, as much evidence shows, working-class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial and gender issues than by economics — many non-college-educated whites are in fact supportive of universal redistribution programs and increased taxes on the rich and corporations — should the Democratic Party do what it can to minimize those sociocultural points of dispute, or should the party stand firm on policies promoted by its progressive wing?

…

Theda Skocpol, a professor of sociology and government at Harvard, argued in an email:

The radicalized G.O.P. is the main anti-democratic force. Trump plays a crucial threatening role, but I think things have now moved to the point that many Republican Party officials and elected officeholders are self-starters. If Trump disappears or steps back, other Trumpists will step up, many are already in power.

…

At the same time, Skocpol is sharply critical of trends within the Democratic Party:

The advocacy groups and big funders and foundations around the Democratic Party — in an era of declining unions and mass membership groups — are pushing moralistic identity-based causes or specific policies that do not have majority appeal, understanding, or support, and using often weird insider language (like “Latinx”) or dumb slogans (“Defund the police”) to do it.

The leaders of these groups, Skocpol stressed,

often claim to speak for Blacks, Hispanics, women etc. without actually speaking to or listening to the real-world concerns of the less privileged people in these categories. That is arrogant and politically stupid. It happens in part because of the over-concentration of college graduate Democrats in isolated sectors of major metro areas, in worlds apart from most other Americans.

…

Galston argues that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party threatens to limit, if not prevent, efforts to enlarge support: “Everything depends on how much the Democrats really want to win. Some progressives, I fear, would rather be the majority in a minority party than the minority in a majority party.”

“In my view,” Galston continued,

the issue is not so much ideology as it is class. Working-class people with less than a college degree have an outlook that differs from that of the educated professionals whose outlook has come to dominate the Democratic Party. To the dismay of Democratic strategists, class identity may turn out to be more powerful than ethnic identity, especially for Hispanics.

…

The party’s “principal weakness,” Galston observes “lies in the realm of culture, which is why race, crime and schools have emerged as such damaging flash points.” In this context, “the Biden administration has failed to articulate views on immigration, criminal justice, education and related issues that a majority of Americans can support.”

Not all of those I contacted have such a dire outlook.

Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, for example, agrees that “American democracy faced an unprecedented threat in 2020 when a sitting president refused to acknowledge electoral defeat,” but, she continued, “this threat was thwarted, to a great extent by that president’s own party. American democracy exhibited significant resilience in the face of the threat Trump posed.”

…

Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote by email that she “certainly see threats, but I am not at all sure right now how deeply I think they undermine American democracy. If the Civil War (or more relevantly here, 1859-60) is the end of one continuum of threat, I don’t think we are close to that yet.”

At the same time, she cautioned,

the Democratic Party over the past few decades has gotten into the position of appearing to oppose and scorn widely cherished institutions — conventional nuclear family, religion, patriotism, capitalism, wealth, norms of masculinity and femininity, then saying “vote for me.” Doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me, especially given the evident failure to find a solution to growing inequality and the hollowing out of a lot of rural and small-town communities. I endorse most or all of those Democratic positions, but the combination of cultural superiority and economic fecklessness is really problematic.

Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is broadly cynical about the motives of members of both political parties.

“The finger pointing and sanctimony on the left is hardly earned,” Westwood replied to my emailed inquiries. Not only is there a long history of Democratic gerrymanders and dangerous assertions of executive power, he continued, but Democrats “can claim virtually no credit for upholding the outcome of the election. Courageous Republican officials affirmed the true vote in Arizona and Georgia and the Republican vice president certified the outcome before Congress.”

…

The Democrats, in Westwood’s view,

must return to being a party of the people and not woke-chasing elites who don’t understand that canceling comedians does not help struggling Americans feed their children. When it comes to financial policy Democrats are far better at protecting the poor, but this advantage is lost to unnecessary culture wars. Democrats need to stop wasting their time on cancel culture or they risk canceling themselves to those who live in the heart of this country.

ALG Research, one of the firms that polled for the 2020 Biden campaign, conducted postelection focus groups in Northern Virginia and suburban Richmond in an attempt to explore the success of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who defeated Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race a month ago.

…

ALG focus group participants

thought Democrats are only focused on equality and fairness and not on helping people. None of these Biden voters associated our party with helping working people, the middle class, or people like them. They thought we were more focused on breaking down social barriers facing marginalized groups. They were all for helping marginalized groups, but the fact that they couldn’t point to anything we are doing to help them was deeply concerning.

In a parallel argument, Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the pro-Democratic Center for American Progress, wrote in an essay, “Democrats, Not Republicans, Need to Defuse the Culture Wars”:

Democrats are not on strong ground when they have to defend views that appear wobbly on rising violent crime, surging immigration at the border and non-meritocratic, race-essentialist approaches to education. They would be on much stronger ground if they became identified with an inclusive nationalism that emphasizes what Americans have in common and their right not just to economic prosperity but to public safety, secure borders and a world-class but nonideological education for their children.

Looking at the dangers facing American democracy from a different vantage point, Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and a co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” rejected the argument that Democrats need to constrain the party’s liberal wing.

…

Jacob Hacker, a professor of political science at Yale, takes a similar position, writing by email:

There are powerful economic and social forces at work here, and they’re particularly powerful in the United States, given that it has a deep history of racial inequality and division and it is on the leading edge of the transformation toward a knowledge economy in which educated citizens are concentrated in urban metros. The question, then, is how much Democrat elites’ strategic choices matter relative to these powerful forces. I lean toward thinking they’re less important than we typically assume.

…

Those who would seek to restore respect for democratic norms in Trump’s Republican Party face another set of problems, according to Wronski. At the moment, she writes, a fundamental raison d’être of the Republican Party is to prevent the political consignment “to minority status” of “whites, and in particular white Christians, whose share of the population, electorate, and federal-level office holders is diminishing.” This commitment effectively precludes the adoption of a more inclusive strategy of “appealing to racial, ethnic, and religious minority voters,” because such an appeal would amount to the abandonment of the Republican Party’s implicit (and often quite explicit) promise to prevent “the threat of minority status that demographic change poses to white Christians.”

Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, anticipates, at least in the short term, a worsening of the political environment:

Trump has the support of nearly half of American voters and is very likely to run for president in 2024. Given electoral trends, there is a high likelihood that he will win. Moreover, even if he doesn’t win legitimately, there is little doubt that he will once again try to subvert the election outcome. At that point, his party is likely to control both houses of Congress and he may be successful in his efforts.

Enos argued in an email that “the liabilities of the Democratic Party can be overstated” when there is

a more fundamental problem in that the working-class base, across racial groups, of the Democratic Party has eroded and is further eroding. That Democrats may not have yet hit rock bottom with working-class voters is terrifying for the future of the party. As much as people want to point to cultural issues as the primary reason for this decline in support, the wheels on the decline were put in motion by macroeconomic trends and policies that made the economic and social standing of working-class people in the United States extremely tenuous.

…

All of this raises a key question: Has the Republican Party passed a tipping point to become, irrevocably, the voice of ultranationalist racist authoritarianism?

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

By Thomas B. Edsall

The damage inflicted on the nation during Donald J. Trump’s first term in office pales in comparison to what he will do if he is elected to a second term. How can we know this? The best evidence is Trump himself. He has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to tear the country apart.

“Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters,” Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, writes in a forthcoming article in Liberties,

have made it clear that they will not accept defeat in November any more than they did when Trump lost four years ago. They believe that Trump is the one true legitimate president, that those who refuse to accept this fundamental fact are the true deniers, and that any result other than Trump’s restoration would be a thwarting of history’s purpose and a diabolical act of treason. The authoritarian imperative has moved beyond Trumpian narcissism and the cultish MAGA fringe to become an article of faith from top to bottom inside the utterly transformed Republican Party, which Trump totally commands.

Like Wilentz, Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, does not mince words, writing by email:

All the dangers foreign and domestic posed by Trump’s cruelly vindictive, self-aggrandizing, morally unconstrained, reality-defying character — as evidenced in his first presidential term and in his unprecedented refusal to accept his 2020 electoral loss — would be magnified many times over in any subsequent term by three factors. First, he has systematically eroded the norms and the institutional guardrails that initially set boundaries on the damage he and his now more carefully chosen loyalist enablers are poised to do in carrying out the dangerous project to which they are jointly committed. Second, their failures to insulate themselves from electoral and legal constraints during the dry run of 2017-21 have led them to formulate far more sophisticated and less vulnerable plans for their second attempt at consolidating permanent control of the apparatus of our fragile republic. And third, their capture of the Supreme Court and indeed much of the federal judiciary has put in place devastating precedents like the immunity ruling of July 1 that will license a virtually limitless autocratic power — if, but only if, they are not stopped during the epic struggle that will reach one climax this Nov. 5 and another next Jan. 6.

The most important reason a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than his first is that if he does win this year, Trump will have triumphed with the electorate’s full knowledge that he has been criminally charged with 88 felonies and convicted of 34 of them (so far); that he has promised to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family”; that he intends to “totally obliterate the deep state” by gutting civil service protections for the 50,000 most important jobs in the federal work force, a central tenet of what he calls his “retribution” agenda.

Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, contended in an email that

The question is how much the Supreme Court presidential immunity decision will undermine institutional guardrails against Trump’s anti-democratic behavior. If there are no repercussions for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, intimidation of election officers, and casual handling of classified materials, then Trump will be emboldened to partake in such activities again. Trump has made clear that norms of governance — e.g., civility, accepting electoral defeat, and treating members of the political opposition as legitimate holders of power — do not apply to him.

While Kamala Harris has pulled even with, if not ahead of, Trump in recent polling, Republican attacks on her have yet to reach full intensity, and the outcome remains very much up for grabs.

Bruce Cain, a Stanford political scientist, voiced concerns similar to Wronski’s by email:

Trump is more erratic, impulsive, and self-interested than your average candidate and is much bolder than most in testing the boundaries of what he can get away with. In political insider lingo, he is a guy who likes to put his toes right up the chalk line between legal and illegal activity. There is some evidence that his bad traits are getting worse with old age, but the more serious problem is the lowering of institutional and political guardrails that constrained him in the past The decision in Trump v. the U.S. entitling a former president to “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” and “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts” seems to me particularly problematic. The court left open the question of how to distinguish between official and unofficial acts. Trump’s personality is such that he will without doubt test the limits of this distinction.

Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale and an expert on the regimesof Stalin and Hitler, wrote by email in reply to my inquiry: “It would be closer to the truth to think about a second Trump administration beginning from the images of Jan. 6, 2021. That is where Trump left us and that is where he would begin.”

Unlike oligarchy and tyranny, Snyder argued,

Democracy depends upon example, and Trump sets the worst possible one. He has openly admired dictators his entire life. He would encourage Xi and Putin. The Russians make completely clear that a Trump presidency is their hope for victory in Ukraine. Allowing Russia to win that war, which I think is Trump’s likely orientation, destabilizes Europe, encourages China toward aggression in the Pacific, and undermines the rule of law everywhere.

Charles Stewart, a political scientist at M.I.T., warned in an email that

A second Trump administration would escalate the threat of authoritarian governance, most notably, by sanctioning politically motivated prosecutions. Even if the courts resisted the baldest of efforts, doing so will be costly to political opponents and also continue to silence dissent among conservatives who wish to have political careers.

In 2016 and in for much of his first term, major elements of the Republican Party viewed Trump with deep suspicion, repeatedly blocking or weakening his more delusional initiatives. That’s no longer the case.

“The Republican Party is fully and totally behind Trump — the epicenter of election disruption — even after two impeachments, an insurrection and a criminal conviction,” Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton, pointed out in an email, adding:

The support that Trump received after Jan. 6, and the entire effort to overturn the election, demonstrates that much of the G.O.P. is fine with doing this. Now that the party knows what insurrection looks like and has given its stamp of approval by nominating Trump, we know that this is officially part of the Republican playbook.

One thing is clear: Trump would assume control of the White House in 2025 with far more power and far fewer restraints than when he took office in January 2017.

Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, argued that Trump’s near dictatorial rule over the Republican Party and the absence of intraparty dissent will play a crucial role if he returns to the White House in 2025:

Democratic backsliding rests heavily on the absence of contrary messages within the party undermining democracy, because (a) this further radicalizes sympathetic voters (who take their cues from in-party politicians) and (b) makes the battle into an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ partisan fight that is easily used by demagogues to justify further democratic backsliding.

Both Hacker and Frances Lee, a Princeton political scientist, pointed out that even with solid support from fellow House and Senate Republicans, Trump’s power and freedom to act will depend on partisan control of the House and Senate.

As Hacker put it,

The scale of the threat posed by a Trump presidency will rest far more than commonly recognized on the exact balance of partisan power in D.C. If Trump has both houses of Congress — along with, of course, a highly sympathetic Supreme Court — the pace and extent of Democratic backsliding will be much greater than if Republicans “merely” hold the White House. Given its role in appointments and its greater prominence, the Senate is the critical fulcrum. We saw in 2019-20 that Democrats holding the House helped keep the spotlight on Trump’s misdeeds and blocked some of Trump’s most egregious potential legislative moves. But House control is worth much less than Senate control, and a Democratic House may not be enough to prevent serious democratic backsliding.

If Democrats win a House majority, Lee wrote by email, “their control of the House would foreclose any opportunity for one-party legislating, such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.”

In addition, Lee argued, “Trump proposals and priorities still do divide the Republican Party internally. Even though Trump has improved his position with the congressional wing of the Republican Party relative to 2017, he still faces pockets of intraparty resistance, especially but not exclusively on foreign policy.”

As a result, Lee wrote, “the remaining Trump-skeptic Republicans in Congress will have pivotal status in a narrow Republican majority. So the bottom line is that we don’t know much about the influence Trump can wield until we see the outcome of the congressional elections.”

Even accounting for Lee’s caution, however, Trump’s base of support has grown over the past eight years to encompass not only the MAGA electorate and the network of elected officials who have learned dissent is politically suicidal, but the individuals and interests that comprise the party’s infrastructure, especially the donors and lobbyists.

Just three-and-a-half years ago, in the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, this wing of the party threatened to become a major roadblock to a second Trump term. Leaders of Wall Street and big business voiced seemingly deep concern over the threat to democracy posed by Trump and his followers, with many of these leaders vowing that they would never contribute to a Trump campaign.

“Many of the nation’s richest people said after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that they would never again back former President Trump,” David Lauter of The Los Angeles Times reported. Those concerns have dissipated.

In March, The Washington Post reported that “Elite donors who once balked at Trump’s fueling of the Capitol insurrection, worried about his legal problems and decried what they saw as his chaotic presidency are rediscovering their affinity for the former president — even as he praises and vows to free Jan. 6 defendants, promises mass deportations and faces 88 felony charges.”

It would be hard to underestimate the importance of Trump’s increasingly strong ties to his party’s financial establishment. His ability to shape the flow of campaign money is second only to the power of his endorsements, making obeisance to his authority even more crucial to political survival.

Trump’s shifting relationship with the Republican establishment’s major donor community can best be seen in the changing composition of his financial backing from 2016 to 2024.

In 2016, many of Trump’s top backers, according to OpenSecrets, could best be described as marginal figures in the world of campaign finance:

McMahon Ventures, a consulting firm founded by the owners of World Wrestling Entertainment, $6 million; Mountainaire, a chicken producer, $2.01 million.

In terms of money, Trump today is a very different candidate. The corporate qualms that surfaced in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection have been subordinated to the prospect of billions in tax breaks for business and the rich if Trump returns to office.

According to OpenSecrets, of the $472.8 million Trump and allied PACs have raised through the middle of this year, a quarter, $115.4 million, has come from the securities and investment industry, the financial core of the Republican establishment. In 2016, this industry effectively shunned Trump, giving him a paltry $20.8 million.

“The leaders of major industries’ decision to back Trump suggests that the economic benefits of staying on the team will outweigh principled concerns about democratic norms should push come to shove in a second Trump term,” Eric Schickler, a political scientist at Berkeley, wrote by email in response to my query.

There are several other factors raising the level of danger posed by a second Trump term in the White House.

When he took office in 2017, Trump had no clear agenda, just a collection of grievances, impulses and prejudices; no carefully prepared list of prospective loyalists to appoint to key posts; and in essence no understanding of the workings of the federal government.

These deficiencies kept many, but not all, of his destructive impulses in check as top aides and key party leaders repeatedly steered him away from the cliff.

If he wins this year, those checks on Trump will be gone.

Trump’s advisers and allies have put together a detailed agenda along with lists of men and women who are ready to do his bidding — developments that have been detailed in this column and elsewhere.

In his email, Schickler emphasized the crucial role played by Trump’s successful efforts to drive Republican opponents out of elective office. Now, Schickler wrote,

“Each Republican member’s own political survival depends on being loyal to the team.” Schickler continued. “Republicans will stand by Trump in any potential impeachment battle — as result, there will be no chance for a conviction, essentially making any attempt to enforce accountability into just another partisan showdown.”

During his first term, Schickler noted, Trump “raised the possibility of taking a threatening action — such as sending in troops to arrest or even shoot protesters,” but he was held back by his own appointees and senior government employees.

“The big difference in 2025,” Schickler cautioned,

is that there is a much more built out political operation supporting Trump. Appointees will be carefully vetted for their loyalty. When it comes time to implement an order that, for example, removes civil service protections from most federal workers, the top layers of executive agencies will be filled with people eager to follow through and weed out those with “bad” views.

Not only is Trump more robustly protected if he returns to the White House in 2025, but a key institution — the Supreme Court — is more likely to back his initiatives now that it is dominated by a 6-3 conservative majority, half of which is made up of Trump appointees.

That conservative bloc has already signaled its willingness to unleash Trump in its July 1 immunity decision, Trump v. United States.

The ruling gave Trump new grounds to challenge the criminal charges and convictions he faces and suggests broad approval for future Trump policies and initiatives. The president, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 6-3 majority opinion, “may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.”

Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, wrote by email:

Trump says he wants to replace the bureaucracy — part of the “deep state” — with political appointees. He wants to go after his political enemies, lock up refugees in camps, and implicit in all this he will appoint cabinet members and high level officials who support what he wants to do instead of the “grown-ups” who constrained him at every turn during his presidency.

In this context, Shapiro continued,

The above threat to democracy has to be seen, on the face of it, as real, given that the Supreme Court has opened the possibility of immunity on any presidential actions, however criminal they might be. What Trump has said he will do, and what the Supreme Court has opened the door to — what he can do in terms of what would be criminal and not just impeachable offenses — pose an enormous threat to the nation and American democracy.

Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, summarized the risks raised by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in an email:

The court’s decisions have made it harder for the judiciary, Congress or other institutions to hold Trump in check. The immunity decision certainly enables an authoritarian presidency far beyond that envisioned by the people who wrote the Constitution.

The biggest difference if Trump is re-elected, Jacobson argued,

will be the absence of officials in the administration with the stature, experience, and integrity to resist Trump’s worst instincts in such matters. A White House staffed with sycophantic loyalists or white nationalist zealots who share Trump’s ignorance and contempt for norms and institutions will give him freer rein than in the first term.

As Sean Wilentz warns:

Trump, who does not speak in metaphors, has made it plain: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath.” This is a time for imagining the worst. Not a single loyal Republican official has objected to that statement or to similar MAGA warnings about an impending civil war.

Yet, Wilentz writes, “many of even the most influential news sources hold to the fiction Trump and his party are waging a presidential campaign instead of a continuing coup, a staggering failure to recognize Trump’s stated agenda.”

I am going to give the last word to Timothy Snyder:

Trump is in the classic dictatorial position: He needs to die in bed holding all executive power to stay out of prison. This means that he will do whatever he can to gain power, and once in power will do all that he can to never let it go. This is a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else. It is entirely inconsistent with democracy.

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions by Thomas B. Edsall

By Thomas B. Edsall Who do so many evangelicals see the former president as God’s “anointed” one? Published: January 17, 2024 at 05:03AM from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/NStmTuv via IFTTT